


Eyes

by DaneofSpades



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-06
Updated: 2015-08-06
Packaged: 2018-04-13 06:15:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4510950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaneofSpades/pseuds/DaneofSpades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The eyes were the problem."</p><p>"He never saw their eyes. He kept them in the dark." </p><p>A short about the morning after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eyes

The eyes were the problem. 

They weren’t particularly flashy, especially in the pale light of dawn. In fact they would most often be presented as stormy. It was just his luck that today he noticed a stippling of rain rimming the eyelid. 

Tony wasn’t fond of the morning after, and he made it a rule to avoid such unpleasantness whenever possible. He made a similar rule to organize events in such an order that the morning after would simply be the night of. He never allowed a woman into his home for this exact reason. 

Hotels were messy and too intransigent to really get his message through, and he felt that the expectation of restlessness got in the way of his true intent. In his college days he had made mistakes enough to exemplify this point, and far too many a night left him walking shamefully down the cracked boulevard that personified seedy hotels, caught out with his trousers halfway up his knees. 

His preferred method of escape was a bathroom, or more often an alleyway, and it was perhaps the deplorable nature of such locales that steered him away from them in the beginning. Both were often dark, if he knew anything about backwater bars, which had the added benefit of obscuring the woman’s face almost entirely. 

He had no hangups about kissing. In fact, without it sex in an alley would draw entirely too much attention to the causeway of grimy walls and the squishing of cigarette butts underfoot. The kissing was personal, and Tony did after all intend to remember each woman he had met underneath gaudy neon sights in the earliest hours of the morning. If they became a blur than so would he, spiraling into a puddle hidden in the asphalt – drowning in the excision of a thousand stormy days. 

It was the stormy days he remembered the most. And the lips, forefront on guiding his feet away from that puddle. 

He never saw their eyes. He kept them in the dark. 

He realized how important this was as he stared at the blue pools gazing up at him. Clear, he noted. Not reflecting but piercing. A window to the sky rather than a mirror to it. The second he stepped in he knew his feet would never find the bottom, but he took a comfort in the fact that if he took that step he would be falling upward. 

Steve blinked, and the limn of moisture disappeared. Indecision took its place, and Tony could feel it stirring in his own stomach. 

Vulnerability was not a good look on Captain America, Tony decided as he watched Steve take a seat at the kitchen table. It was not a look that set well. Not one that aligned with the outlines of his face. It was almost as if what he understood to be guilt was trying to cram its way into the expression. It knew it didn’t belong but if he put enough force behind it maybe it would fit, like a toddler ramming away at the square hole with a circular tile. 

In contrast, fear was a mask Tony best wore as the first line of defense. Fear was a smile. Fear was taking a knife to that circular tile and carving out the square hidden within. 

For the first time in his life, fear balked. The string holding up the back of the mask had been cut at first sight of his eyes. The eyes he had never seen, and never meant to. 

The sound of shattered porcelain was stentorian in the calm of morning, and he felt four more pairs of eyes snap up from the table and lock onto his. Steve’s barely widened. Tony had only dropped a mug, but it felt as though every mask he had ever worn had crashed down alongside it. 

“Tony?” Steve asked, but it wasn’t a question. It was a realization. 

Tony swallowed and blinked a couple times to steady himself. “This is why JARVIS gets the mugs,” he said. Even his voice sounded broken. 

The others laughed as if nothing was out of place. The four of them leaned down to help, grinning right back at him as he made another joke about slurping up the coffee from the floorboards. 

Steve stayed in his seat. Vulnerability had finally seemed to find a crease in his face to hide in, and only a flicker of uncertainty remained. Tony was sure that his own fear was etched into every pore, a calligraphic scream that begged for isolation. Begged for leave to shout itself out of his mouth, his hands, his feet. It had crawled its way down his body and left him shaking. 

Steve didn’t hesitate. 

Tony had seen him think before every decision he had ever made. Even something natural and free like flinging his shield, fighting his way through adversity with his team at his back. There was always something in his eyes, something that Tony realized he had missed before. A stippling of rain to denote the storm. 

When Steve left the chair the promise of rain was gone. The clouds were white as they encircled his iris, and at their heart shone a deep blue. A puddle he could afford to step in. A kiss he could spiral into. 

Tony was swept up from the ground in a single movement, and he couldn’t say whether it was Steve’s arms or his own shuddering legs that had lifted him from the floor. 

Tony had a new rule jotted down as the next morning trundled its way over the horizon. Never keep love in the dark.


End file.
